10 Gigabit Ethernet server port shipments near peak: Dell'Oro

Shipments of 10 Gigabit Ethernet network server ports will continue to climb through 2017 before beginning to plateau and decline the following year, says Dell'Oro Group. The market research firm states in a new five-year forecast report that 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports will capture more than 50% of the total server market by 2017, but will begin to fall prey to the growing popularity of higher-speed ports beginning in 2018.

Shipments of 10 Gigabit Ethernet network server ports will continue to climb through 2017 before beginning to plateau and decline the following year, says Dell'Oro Group. The market research firm states in a new five-year forecast report that 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports will capture more than 50% of the total server market by 2017, but will begin to fall prey to the growing popularity of higher-speed ports beginning in 2018.

"Two major upgrade cycles will be happening in the data center, the first being the enterprise migration towards 10 Gigabit Ethernet and the second being cloud migration to 25/50/100 Gigabit," explains Sameh Boujelbene, director at Dell'Oro. "Enterprise migration to 10 Gigabit has been slow but will finally manifest over the next two years, driven by a more complete 10GBase-T ecosystem.

"As the enterprise server market is shrinking, however, and as most of the growth in server shipments will be driven by the cloud segment, we are forecasting that 10 Gigabit will peak by 2018," he continues. "In the meantime, 25/50/100 Gigabit, the next network speeds for cloud servers, will continue to grow to about a quarter of total controller and adapter ports by 2018; that's about three years from 25/50/100 early shipments."

The divergent requirements of cloud customers and the rest of the market (i.e., high-performance computing versus high-end enterprise versus small to medium businesses) will have a clear impact on server form factors as well as controllers and adapters form factors, Dell'Oro says in the report.